Claim:

Since the Department of Education was established in 1979, the US has fallen from first to 24th in the world in education.

Rating:

On November 11, 2024, owner X Elon Musk posted a image (archived) of former US President Jimmy Carter, with the title: “In 1979 we created the Department of Education. Since then, America has gone from No. 1 to No. 24 in education.”

Musk wrote in his postwho had gathered over 64 million views and 613,000 likes at the time of writing: “Not great value for money!”

President-elect Donald TrumpWHO named Musk to serve as co-commissioner of the new Department of Government Efficiency, has repeatedly stated his plan to close the US Department of Education.

There are two parts to this statement: whether the US currently ranks 24th in the world in education, and whether it ranked first in 1979.

In short, there is no single definitive scale that determines the education quality ranking of nations around the world, although several organizations have published their own ratings. Snopes was unable to track down a rating that found the US ranked 24th worldwide. Musk’s post also didn’t specify several key elements, such as the year the U.S. ranked 24th or what ratings the claim refers to. We have therefore assessed this claim as unfounded.

Snopes has reached out to Musk and the Department of Education to seek evidence of the claim and will update this story if we hear back.

As of this writing, is the US ranked 24th in the world?

Various organizations have come to different conclusions, but Snopes has found no significant survey, report, or analysis indicating that the US ranks 24th globally in education in 2024.

For example, US News ranked the US first in its widely cited 2024 Best Countries report, which analyzed the views of “nearly 17,000 global citizens”.

(usnews.com)

On the other hand, a report of WorldTop20 — a project associated with New Jersey Minority Educational Development, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit group. quoted by World Population Review (visible when clicking on the USA on the world map at this link) — found that in 2024, the US ranked 31st worldwide in education.

Other studies provide a more detailed assessment, broken down by subject and parameter and compared to other countries of similar wealth, such as Organization for Economic Cooperation and Developmentan intergovernmental organization with 38 member countries. For example, according to the average scores of 15-year-olds in 37 member countries in 2022, the US ranked above average in science and below average in mathematics.

(OECD, PISA 2022)

In OECD findings from 2024US ranked 20 out of 41 countries in education in general. In 2015, result FROM THE Program for the evaluation of international students – which tests 15-year-olds in dozens of countries every three years – placed USA ranked 38th in 71 countries in math and 24th in science.

Was the US #1 globally in education in 1979?

There was also no indication that the US ranked first globally in education in 1979, which may be in part because international rankings were rudimentary at the time. However, a 1992 report published by the National Center for Education Statistics (part of the US Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences) found that after administering science and math tests up to 10-, 13- and 14-year-olds from the 1960s to 1988 in six to 18 countries (depending on subject and grade level), the evidence generally suggested that:

Students in the United States did quite poorly on these assessments, with their score(s) lagging behind those of students in other developed countries. This finding is based largely on analyzes of the average achievement scores and rankings of the countries participating in each survey.

A 2022 analysis found that average student achievement in the US rose from 1971 to 2017. The report, by Paul E. Peterson of Harvard University and M. Danish Shakeel from The University of Buckingham extracted data from 7 million tests taken by American students born between 1954 and 2007.

The analysis found that the overall trend in math and reading has been generally upward since 1971, with black, Hispanic and Asian students improving “much faster” than their white peers in elementary, middle and high school.

(Analysis by M. Daniel Shakeel and Paul E. Peterson)

Finally, the effect of the Department of Education itself on improved education environments and global rankings is unclear. The department started as a means of collecting data at the national level and today it is primarily responsible to distribute and monitor federal financial aid, set financial aid policies, and collect data about U.S. schools.

In total…

There was no evidence to support the claim that since Carter founded the Department of Education in 1979, the US had dropped from first to 24th in the world in education.

Rather, one report found that US students’ scores were “lagging behind” students in other developed countries from the 1960s to 1988, and another analysis found that, on average, US student achievement rose between 1971 and 2017.

At the time of writing, the rankings vary, and there is no definitive source to confirm the current US situation. It is also unclear what effect the existence of the Department of Education had on the US statute education in relation to other countries.